People & HR
Handbooks and policies answered consistently, with sensitive material kept apart.
Who it's for
People and HR teams who answer the same policy questions every week, and the managers and employees who ask them.
What Workstate does for you
You upload the handbook and your policies. An agent answers each question by quoting the policy and citing it, so two people who ask the same question get the same answer.
Some cases aren't settled by the text. When HR decides how a policy applies to one of them, the agent records the interpretation in the ledger, and later answers follow it. People who don't use an agent can find the same passages on the console's Search page.
The prompts below are illustrative. Change the documents and project names to your own.
Answer a policy question
text
How many days of parental leave do employees in the UK get? Quote the handbook section and cite it.Answer the same way as last time
text
Search the ledger for how we've handled requests to work from another country. Then draft a reply to this request that takes the same position and cites it.Record an interpretation
text
Record a decision in project "handbook": working from another country is allowed for up to 30 days a year with manager approval. Cite the remote work policy section it interprets.Update after a policy change
text
The travel policy changed today. Record a new decision with the new per diem rule, citing the new document, and supersede handbook-0012.Sources to connect
Available now
- Upload files, for the handbook and policy documents in PDF or Word.
- Confluence, if your handbook is a Confluence space.
Coming soon
- Google Drive Coming soon
- Slack Coming soon
Keep sensitive material apart
Workstate has no per-document permissions. Everyone with access to a namespace can search everything indexed in it. Plan two tiers:
| Namespace (for example) | Holds | Who needs it |
|---|---|---|
| Handbook | The handbook and the policies every employee may read | Everyone who asks policy questions |
| People team | Procedures and guidance that only HR may read | The HR team |
Don't index records about individual employees, such as reviews, pay or case notes. Search makes anything indexed easy to find, and you can't hide one document from someone who can reach its namespace.
Everyone who is an owner or admin when a namespace is created is given it. Anyone else reaches it only when an owner or admin gives it to them, in their invitation or in the Namespaces column on the Team page. Before you upload anything to a restricted namespace, check that column and remove anyone who shouldn't have it. Only an owner can change an owner's access.
Instructions to give your agents
Add these rules to the shared agent instructions:
md
- Quote the policy and cite the document for every answer. If the policy doesn't answer the question, say so and suggest asking HR.
- Before answering a question about how a policy applies, search the ledger for a recorded interpretation, and follow the current one.
- Never put an employee's name or personal details in a ledger topic. Describe the situation instead.Ledger habits
- One decision per interpretation, written so it applies to the next case, not only this one.
- Supersede when a policy changes. The old interpretation stays on record, with the date it stopped applying.
- Keep people out of it. Record the rule and the reasoning, not who asked.
An illustrative example
Illustrative
Two managers ask, a week apart, whether a team member can work from abroad for a month. The first answer took HR an afternoon. The policy says nothing about duration, so HR agreed a rule, and their agent recorded it as handbook-0017.
The second manager's agent finds handbook-0017 and quotes it, with the policy section it interprets. The second manager has the same answer in a minute.
Limits to know
- Everyone who uses Workstate signs in with GitHub, so each person needs a GitHub account. SSO Coming soon isn't available yet.
- People record to the ledger through an agent. The console's Ledger page is for reading.
- Uploaded documents change only when an admin uploads a new version.
- A scanned PDF without a text layer has no text to search.